The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket door Edgar Allan Poe

Plot:

This novel is a first-person narrative concerning the sea adventures of an adolescent called Arthur Gordon Pym. As the story progresses, Arthur and his fellow adventurers (a group which contains both friends and foes of Arthur) encounter various extraordinary obstacles, such as mutiny, shipwreck, a corpse-ridden ghost ship, and a horde of deceiving cannibals, among other things.

Characters:

I will now continue to name and describe the most prominent characters appearing in this book:

Arthur Gordon Pym:
He is both the narrator and the main character of the book. The story revolves solely around Arthur's memories, travel logs, and sometimes even drawings (with the exception of some final notes not written from his perspective given). His background is a tad bit vague. At the beginning of the story (when Arthur is 16 years old), he seems to be quite an ambitious boy, yet he still has the problems of most people his age. For instance, he goes aboard the ship (called the Grampus), without the permission of his parents, and he would write them when the ship was so far off the coast that it was too late for the captain to turn back.
Yet this quite normal image of a boy his age is contradicted by his sometimes extraordinary knowledge of the things he encounters. A good example to illustrate this point would be his extremely accurate description of the albatross and its mating habits (which, by the by, has nothing to do with the story at hand whatsoever). Perhaps the formal and complicated style in which Arthur narrates his story is a bit deceiving, since he supposedly wrote his story after he had come back from his adventure.
Arthur Gordon Pym, despite being the narrator, dies at the end of the book. For more clarification, proceed to read my summary of this book.

Augustus:
In the beginning of his book, he appears to be Arthur's best (and only mentioned) friend. He is the son of the captain of the Grampus, the ship Arthur will board to start his adventure. Due to an aforementioned reason (concerning Arthur's parents), he secretly gets Arthur aboard the ship, where he hides him for several weeks. He had originally planned to get Arthur out of his hiding place when it was too late for the captain to turn back his ship. He is soon forced, however, to drastically adjust his plans, because the crew soon takes control of the ship, and puts the captain in a lifeboat, in a severely wounded state. Augustus can now barely get to Arthur to deliver him fresh food and water, which almost causes Arthur to die.
After the mutiny, and a struggle for power on the ship, Augustus gets wounded, which causes him to die a slow and painful death. Arthur and his only remaining companion Peters (who will be more widely described later on in this book report) are forced to feed Augustus's lifeless body to the sharks, which were continually terrorizing the steerless ship.

Peters:
Originally one of the mutineers. Out of necessity, he forms an alliance with Arthur and Augustus to get rid of the cook and his crew, thus taking control of the ship. He is a small but muscled man, making him an extremely good fighter. He stays without Arthur for the entire story, and is apparently the only prominent character to live at the end of the novel.

The cook and his crew:
The black cook, whose actual name never gets revealed in the story, forms a group of a part of the mutineers, as opposed to Peters and his crew. The two parties disagree on where to sail next, which leads to the cook and his crew being killed in its entirety, except for Richard Parker, who surrenders to his attackers.

Richard Parker:
At first, he was a part of the cook's crew. When he's the only one of his party left, however, he surrenders, and becomes a part of Peters's party. Not much later, he gets eaten by his shipmates (which was necessary, due to a food shortage upon the wrecked ship), as he draws the shortest straw.

Summary:

The novel starts with Arthur giving a short notice on how he got in contact with the person that will publish his story. This isn't very interesting for the rest of the story, so I'll leave it at this.
Arthur is a 16 year-old American boy yearning for adventure. After a while, he decides to secretly get aboard whaling ship the Grampus, with the help from his companion Augustus, who also happens to be the son of the ship's captain. Because Arthur assumes that his parents will most likely not permit him to go on such a large and dangerous journey, he plans on hiding in the ship's storage room, but to come out when it was already too late for the captain to take him back to land. With the help of Augustus, who brings him fresh water and food (and sometimes lets him get some fresh air), he remains in his hiding place for several days, without much trouble.

At one point, however, Augustus stops coming for a long while, nearly causing Arthur to either starve or choke to death, because of the lack of food and fresh air, respectively. Augustus tried to write Arthur a note, but Arthur could read but for a few words, because he had also ran out of candles, imprisoning him in the darkness. As Arthur had nearly died, Augustus finally came to visit him, again. Augustus told him that the crew had rebelled against the captain, and that they had forced him to leave the ship in a lifeboat, in a wounded state. His fate is thus uncertain, to say the least. Because the crew was negative towards Augustus (for he was the captain's son) - in fact, they had just barely spared his life - he wasn't able to come down to Arthur's hiding place, because that would possibly track too much attention, very likely resulting in the deaths of Augustus, and maybe even Arthur.
Due to this reason, Arthur had to stay hiding for a little while longer, but at least he received some fresh supplies of water, food, and air.

After a while, the crew divides itself into two groups, due to a disagreement on where to sail next. These two groups are those of Peters, a small but strong man, who has been most kind to Augustus, especially given the situation, and the group of the black cook. As time progresses, more and more men of Peters's group join the black cook. This enables Augustus to get Arthur out of his hiding place, introducing him as an extra member of Peters's party.

Soon they plot to kill out the members of the other group, as it kept growing, thus endangering Peters's and his companions more and more. In this they succeed, when they kill everyone except for one man, called Richard Parker, who surrenders to them, and joins their group.

However, due to an incredible storm, the ship is largely destroyed, and a wreck is all that is left of the now steerless ship. Not knowing where they will go, they decide to just try and stay alive for as long as possible, by consuming the ship's remaining food supplies. However, after these are starting to diminish at a rapid rate, the four remaining crew members are forced to draw straws. The one who draws the shortest straw would be killed and eaten.
This unfortunate fate is cast upon Richard Parker, who is killed by Peters, and consumed by him and his two remaining companions.
After a while, Augustus, who was still injured from a fight with the cook's crew, is starting to worsen. After the pain becomes more unbearable, he slowly dies. His remains are thrown overboard, after which they are consumed by the sharks, which were still swimming around the ship.

This series of unfortunate events led to Peters and Arthur being left on the ship all by themselves. During this period, the main concern of the two sailors is to stay alive, until they would be rescued by whatever ship they’d run into first. Ironically, the first ship they run into actually is a ghost ship. By its description, one can assume that this ship actually is The Flying Dutchman (a legendary Dutch ghost ship which is supposed to have been doomed to sail the Seven Seas until Judgment Day).
The validity of this extraordinary account, however, is questionable. It could be that, due to them being severely underfed, Peters and Arthur actually started hallucinating (which is not coincidentally probably the source of the original legend, as well).

After countless times of almost starving, and being tormented by destructive storms, Arthur and Peters are saved by the crew of a ship called the Jane Guy. Along with this crew, Arthur and Peters set sail for the South Pole. As the book progresses, and the ship gets closer to its destination, Arthur tells of various observations he made of the nature, during the journey. These quite detailed accounts, which actually last until the final chapters of this book, are quite irrelevant to the story, which is why I won’t go into detail on these anecdotes.

The Jane Guy sailed a bit into the Antarctic waters, but turned back, as they saw no possibilities of progressing into this unconquered continent any further. (Note that the heart of the South Pole wasn’t reached until the beginning of the 20th century, long after this book had been written. Moreover, in the time this novel was written, it was not yet a certainty that Antarctica’s ice actually covered land, instead of just being a collection of floating icebergs like the North Pole. Poe, however, does seem aware of this now universally known fact.) The crew decides to settle itself for a while on an archipelago of islands, inhabited by seemingly hospitable natives. The natives co-operate with the sailors, and supply them in their needs.

Soon, however, the natives set up an ambush, which kills most of the crew, with the exception of Arthur and Peters, and a few sailors who stayed on the ship (the latter party is killed not soon after the ambush). Arthur and Peters, after having to find and fight their way out of an abyss, remain hidden on the island, until they take the chance to escape the island, by stealing a boat from the natives. They get this chance due to the natives accidentally killing themselves in large numbers, when setting fire to the ship, which consequentially blows up.

During their escape, they manage to capture one of the natives, whom they use for information, as well as an extra rowing force. At the end of the final chapter, the three-headed “crew” encounters a “shrouded human figure”, with a skin as “the perfect whiteness of the snow”.

Just when Arthur starts to describe what seems to be the most extraordinary and supernatural observation he had seen during his expedition, this last chapter is continued by a note on the text, penned down by an unnamed narrator, announcing that 'Mr. Pym' had supposedly died during the writing of his story.

Opinion:

In my opinion, this book was actually very enjoyable. Arthur nearly dies various times during this book, and you can almost feel the exhaustion when he yet again gasps for air, or almost faints because of his immense hunger. It must be noted, however, that I expected more of this book in terms of supernatural accounts. To add to this point, when Arthur does finally encounter such a thing, he dies. This may add to the bizarre atmosphere of this novel, however; like with horror movies, some things are actually scarier if you do not see (or in this case, read) them.

Edgar Allan Poe’s style is mature, as well as detailed. Throughout the book, you get the idea that Poe must’ve been a very educated man, given his detailed accounts concerning both biological and scientific subjects. His style is, in a way, comparable to the style of Charles Dickens, the famous English novelist, who lived in roughly the same period as Poe. The two have actually met when Dickens was in the USA, and Dickens even had influence on some of Poe’s later works.

All in all, this novel is quite enjoyable, although some words will be unfamiliar to those who aren’t very good at reading English.